Yokohama Cocktail

Yet another obscure lost classic

The Yokohama Cocktail took a long time to find and dissect and recreate, but AI is my friend. However, as much as I have bonded with chatGPT, it has led me astray too many times so now I've begun using Claude, which is much more in depth, but also makes plenty of mistakes. And if it can fuck up cocktail recipes, imagine what it's doing with your health recommendations!

In this instance I pitted them against each other to figure out what the true original recipe was and where it came from. Turns out, it was not from the much cited 1930 Savoy cocktail book, but rather from the 1923 Harry of Ciro's ABC of mixing cocktails. Check it out and read for yourself. It's pretty cool that it's the actual book and it's searchable and the pages turn...

Anyway, the reason I ended up here is that I had just made a batch of grenadine, this time with pomegranate molasses instead of pomegranate juice and I was chatting with chatGPT about classic recipes that use grenadine and what grenadine was like back 100 years ago, etc. (that's what I talk to it about since no one else will). I got a long list of recipes, lots of tiki drinks, most of which I already knew, but this one captured my curiosity because it uses both orange juice and absinthe, which chatGPT pointed out was an interesting pre-cursor to the tiki era use of the two together. The original recipe is filled with 1/3 or 1/6 oz. of each ingredient, so I scaled it up but cut the orange juice in half because otherwise it would be a juice bomb. Also, don't skimp on the absinthe. You can go up to a full 1/4 oz.

As far as grenadine goes, the easiest recipe is 1 cup sugar, 1 cup unsweetened pomegranate juice, 1-2 whole cloves, 1 teaspoon of orange blossom water, squeeze of lemon, 1/2 oz. or less of vodka to preserve. Heat slowly to dissolve sugar, try not to boil. There are other recipes out there that are similar and will work too. My dalliance with pomegranate molasses was probably unnecessary. However, if you use anything fluorescent from a bottle you don't belong on my blog!

Anyway, enjoy!

Yokohama Cocktail

• 1 oz Gin

• 1⁄2 oz Vodka

• 3⁄4 oz Orange juice

• 1⁄2 oz homemade grenadine

• 3 dashes (1/8 to 1/4 oz.) Absinthe

  
  

Shake, strain, serve up in a cocktail glass

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